What Google Analytics Custom Alerts and Custom Insights from GA4 are?
Both are capable of alerting you to significant changes in your GA traffic.- GA Custom Alerts: Available for pre-GA4 Google Analytics properties let you check and alert you about trends in your data based on conditions you can create
- Analytics Insights are part of the new Analytics intelligence which provides 1. Automated Insights that notify you automatically of unusual trends in your data 2. Custom Insights where you create the conditions to detect in detail these unusual trends
Why should I use Custom Alerts and Custom Analytics Insights?
These tools come in handy because of their automation in checking data and sending emails whenever something unusual is detected. When your GA Property starts to get more and more traffic or when you have to manage different clients’ GA properties, some important trends in the traffic you manage can be missed. With an intelligent setting of these tools, this can be avoided as much as possible. In addition, you have a history for future reference about what happened on that particular day with already automated generated reports.How to set up Custom Alerts and Custom Analytics Insights in Google Analytics
Let’s begin with a quick step by step guide on how to set up Custom Alerts and Custom Analytics insights Custom Alerts:- Click on Customization
- Click on Custom Alerts
- Click on Manage customised alerts
4. After have clicked on New Alert you can choose which conditions to apply Custom Analytics insights: - Click on Reports – it’s the first row top-left and click on Report Snapshot
- Scroll down until you see the Insight Card and click on View insights
- You’ll see a tab coming from the left side of your screen. Click on Crea
4. Here you can choose between:- Suggested Insights
- Start from scratch
Now is the time to create your Custom Alert / Insight. Wondering what can be useful checks to perform on your data? Here below is a general view of them and our useful suggestions.What Custom Alert / Custom Insights should I create?
It really depends on your data and how deep these checks should be but first let’s have a look at the interface for both of them and then go through some initial tips you can benefit from.- Custom Alerts, pre GA4 Analytics Property
After having chosen an Alert name you can choose to receive an alert email ticking the checkbox and inserting your email afterwards. Under Alert conditions, you can choose - To apply them to All Traffic or to specific Segments of traffic
- The conditions for which the alert is triggered
- To apply them to All Traffic or to specific Segments of traffic
- The conditions for which the alert is triggered
Tips about Custom Alerts and Custom Insights- Start small – Having too many alerts and being too detailed can cause too many false alarms. To begin we suggest starting to create them to monitor if the tracking is down a particular segmentation of your Users or All Users looking at metrics like Sessions – Users or Pageviews. We’d say that having a check to see if the metrics mentioned above goes below 50+%
- Don’t check only decrease in your data – Sometimes also a huge increase in your metrics is a symptom of something wrong in progress
- Work with segmentation – Checking all Users is a good start but also looking at a Segment of your users can give you good insights. An area where you should create a Segment and apply an alert can be the checkout steps or the registration/login of the users
- Check your Custom Metrics&Dimensions \ Definitions – Once you have tested a basic coverage of checks on your data can be worthwhile to also add some check on Custom Metrics if you use them in your daily reports
